UNTRAINED
UNTRAINED - Merrigong Theatre Company
UNTRAINED - Merrigong Theatre Company
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Nothing Hidden, Much Gained.<br />
RealTime<br />
March 2009<br />
Reviewed by Carl Nilsson-Polias<br />
The titles of Lucy Guerin’s recent works have been marked by clarity and transparency, even<br />
literalness. Structure and Sadness dealt with the aftermath of grief caused by the west gate<br />
bridge collapse. Melt was a duet for two water molecules that move from ice through to<br />
steam. Corridor limited itself to a long traverse stage and took a corridor scene from Kafka<br />
as its inspiration. And now Untrained juxtaposes two artists trained as dancers with two<br />
artists untrained as dancers.<br />
Contrast these examples with the titular and choreographic opacity of Shelley Lasica’s<br />
Vianne and there would appear to be nothing hidden in Guerin’s world, nothing that is so<br />
mysterious that it cannot be elucidated in a simple, perfectly decipherable title. For her<br />
critics, this is a cause for frustration: her works can be seen as the physical equivalent of<br />
begging the question in rhetoric, where the proposition assumes its own truth before being<br />
argued. In other words, is the dance redundant once you read the program notes?<br />
Yet, aside from the inherent value judgements involved in meriting metaphor over<br />
literalness, describing Guerin’s dance as redundant is to deny its capacity to transcend the<br />
admittedly literal text that tries to encapsulate it. Guerin is not given to ornateness in her<br />
language but her sensibility for the human form is far from plain—the duets across her<br />
body of work are remarkable in their mesmerising intimacy, their detail and their capacity to<br />
enliven the space between the dancers as much as they animate the bodies themselves.<br />
Moreover, by starting with such conceptual distillation, Guerin’s work emerges from a kind<br />
of purity, with every subsequent extrapolation seeming to fit and flow on perfectly from the<br />
last.<br />
Indeed, it is a questioning of purity that lies at the heart of Untrained. The title is easily<br />
decipherable, yes, but what is it to be untrained? Is the untrained body pure in its<br />
movement—unfettered by the conditioning of choreography and exercises? Or is it the<br />
trained body, in its refinement and exactitude, that achieves purity by sublimation? Guerin<br />
is certainly not looking for an easy solution to this dialectic. She is interested in what it does<br />
to us as an audience and to the performers themselves to see these questions made<br />
manifest by exploring the continuum from pure naivety to pure technique.<br />
Her staging of Untrained maintains this notion of purity. The set is nothing more than a grey<br />
playing square marked out by broad white lines. It is a clever delimiter, its form suggestive